Maastricht University at AMIYA: Adapting LLMs for Dialectal Arabic using Fine-tuning and MBR Decoding
Year: 2026
Type: conference-paper
Abstract: Large Language Models (LLMs) are becoming increasingly multilingual, supporting hundreds of languages, especially high resource ones.Unfortunately, Dialect variations are still underrepresented due to limited data and linguistic variation.In this work, we adapt a pre-trained LLM to improve dialectal performance.Specifically, we use Low Rank Adaptation (LoRA) fine-tuning on monolingual and English-Dialect parallel data, adapter merging and dialect-aware MBR decoding to improve dialectal fidelity generation and translation.Experiments on Syrian, Moroccan, and Saudi Arabic show that merging and MBR improve dialectal fidelity while preserving semantic accuracy.This combination provides a compact and effective framework for robust dialectal Arabic generation.
Authors: Abdulhai Alali, Abderrahmane Issam
Institution: Maastricht University
Language: English
Subfield: Artificial Intelligence
Field: Computer Science
Domain: Physical Sciences
Open Access status: hybrid
OpenAlex ID: W7140102232
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